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Of course Dalton McGuinty would call, she thought. His Liberals had swept Ernie Eves and the Conservatives out of office with a commanding 72 of 100 seats and she was appreciated as a party workhorse. She’d ridden the opposition benches since her first win as an MPP in 1995; it was time for a promotion.

Pupatello says politics is in her DNA and she always wanted to be in cabinet, preferably in a critical economic portfolio in the country’s second-largest government.

She thought the new premier understood her passion. “He knows how committed I am,” she told herself. “He knows what I can do.”

The call came at last — with its offer not of a high-profile portfolio but community and social services and responsibility for women’s issues.

“I didn’t have the nerve to ask for what I wanted,” says Pupatello, a decade later. “I really learned after that.”

She discovered that others with ambition hadn’t been at all shy about asking — or rather, pushing — for what they wanted. “Except me.”

She valued her first ministry, where she raised social assistance by 3 per cent in the 2004 budget and another 2 per cent in 2006. But she wasn’t running with the big dogs in McGuinty’s cabinet.

Not then, anyway.

She discovered there’s no room for false modesty in politics. You’d have thought that a lifetime of playing competitive sports at school, always feeling “like one of the guys” and having a brother as her only sibling would have taught her that. Not to mention coming from Windsor, a largely blue-collar town with backbone and attitude.

Understandably, she has particularly high regard for the gritty advice she got recently from Alberta Conservative Premier Alison Redford. Since announcing her candidacy Nov. 8, Pupatello’s been working the phones, seeking insight across the country. She says Redford told her that “when she started trying to make changes, (she realized) that anyone who was balking was probably part of the problem.”

There’s a message in that. If Pupatello wins the leadership this weekend and emerges as premier-designate, members of the Liberal caucus should consider themselves warned.

There’s no campaign bus and she tootles around with staffers, friends or her husband Jim Bennett, the canny Newfoundland Liberal who urged her to fight for the premiership. She pounds home her message of jobs and the economy under the banner, “Sandra — for a change.” It can be tricky portraying yourself as an outsider with only 18 months in the private sector.

She’s front-runner among delegates by a slim margin over Kathleen Wynne to a brokered convention that can slip away on a whim or sour mood on the floor. Pupatello has 509 elected delegates to the veteran cabinet minister’s 468, and the two campaigns claim 106 ex-officio delegates for Pupatello and 88 for Wynne. These are the riding executives, former leaders and party pooh-bahs who participate in what could be a one-ballot victory or long hours of horse-trading with a series of votes to choose the winner among six candidates.

She’s been criticized for running a campaign that’s light on policy but she makes no apology for focusing — and refocusing —on jobs. Everywhere she repeats: “Jobs are everything.”

She delivers the message from Windsor to communities like Timmins and Thunder Bay with the added dig that she’s not from Toronto and understands their isolation. She talks about economic development in the resource rich Ring of Fire, stressing the need for infrastructure development and cooperation with the mining sector. There must be energy initiatives and road building – sort of a Pupatello new deal. As well, while short on specifics, she advocates partnerships with First Nation communities to develop sustainable, long-term benefits. For starters, she says, the federal government must meet all its commitments to aboriginal communities.

Michael Gravelle, natural resources minister, says he “bonded with her immediately” after both were elected in 1995. “We’re both scrappy people from good labour towns,” he says. From Thunder Bay-Superior North, he says it’s significant that all four northern Liberals support Pupatello because she’s “been out there and touched people on a personal level. She’s fighting for our regions . . . She takes her work seriously, but one of the great pleasures with Sandra is that she laughs a lot.”

Not surprisingly her most detailed analysis is on jobs and economic development. She’d take a page from Frank McKenna’s book when he was premier of New Brunswick and put a “jobs co-ordinator” in the premier’s office. It’s the only way, she says, to give businesses the “concierge service” they deserve under her leadership. Whether the business is agriculture, mining, manufacturing, “there’s no excuse anymore to be too slow off the mark.” During her stint in the private sector, she saw the speed with which companies are making “historic decisions . . . now within the same fiscal quarter” and she wants Ontario in on the action.

She’s a big fan of the TTC and blasts Ottawa for failing to support the transportation system, especially when she insists every modern economy makes major contributions to transit in its biggest city – except in Canada. Toronto’s a city dying in gridlock and she’s going to fight Ottawa on it, pushing for a fair share of money for the city.

She points to her 18 months with PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada, saying it gave her perpective. Take education and the sour mood of Ontario teachers. She wasn’t there for Bill 115 that forced a contract on them and took away the right to strike, before being repealed Jan. 23.

“They did not like what happened to them and I get it. I wasn’t there for it and it’s hard for me to understand the decisions that (led to) Bill 115 . . . I hope they cut me a little slack.”

She makes no promises; she seldom does on issues. But, she adds, “the caveat for me really is the restoration of extracurricular activities.”

Pupatello compares the skills learned for an honours BA in industrial psychology, plus a few philosophy courses, to Wayne Gretzky’s ability to see the puck several moves ahead. “You can’t be mired in today,” says the self-styled political Gretzky.

“You have to understand how people come to make decisions. They get driven more by emotions than they want to admit.” In running a government, “it helps to know what people want and will want . . . I think I have good political instincts.”

“There’s a magic about her,” says David Peterson, the former Liberal premier who knows a thing or two about charisma in politics. At risk of running out of adjectives, he adds: “There’s an infectious, affectionate energy about her. She exudes warmth . . . and she’s too smart to conk anybody over the head with her ideas. She knows how to listen . . . She’s the real deal.”

Even in elementary school, she towered over most girls, on her way to her adult height of 5-foot-10. She remembers having to line up at the back with the boys and imagines herself to be ungainly. Her dad used to tell her to wear high heels so she’d walk more like a woman.

Maybe that’s why she’s known at Queen’s Park for stilettos and big hair.

At lunchtime recently, she strolls into a downtown restaurant across from her campaign headquarters at Yonge and College and patrons swivel from watching hockey on TV to stare. Her style is eclectic — paisley jacket over paisley blouse, black pants and heels, clothes she’s not afraid to be seen in more than once. Her jewelry is noticeable, silver chain loops with pearls, earrings and rings. “My husband says the older the woman, the bigger the jewelry,” says Pupatello, who turned 50 last October.

The jewelry comes courtesy of Lenore Simpson, now 83, who hired a teenage Sandra at her Windsor personnel agency and remains part of the Pupatello female network. “She wasn’t a fashionista,” says Simpson, on the line from Windsor. “I got after her. I told her, ‘You’ve got to accessorize your clothes,’ and she did.”

It would be understandable for her waitress to be frustrated with a customer who turns an order into a scene from When Harry Met Sally. Pupatello wants a vegetable omelette plate, with spinach, no home fries. When told there was spinach in the salad, she takes extra tomato slices and still negotiates for the spinach. No toast.

“I’m heath conscious,” she says, as a little side bowl of undressed spinach arrives. “I’m not into thin, I’m into fit. These things were instilled early in my life and I’m sure it was sports in the early days.” She still works out in the gym and goes for long walks with her husband near the village of Daniel’s Harbour, on the west coast of Newfoundland’s northern peninsula. From an established Liberal family, he sits in the provincial House of Assembly.

She has an easy charm and makes time for her friends. “There’s that kind of supportive woman, like Lenore, and the other kind who feels threatened by women,” says Pupatello. She falls into the first camp.

“My strongest image of her is standing at her kitchen counter rolling gnocchi and making food for all of us,” says her friend, Pam Brajak Mady, who’s almost a decade younger. “She’s so much fun. I met her 20 years ago and she’s exactly the same today as she was back then. She was always supportive of me as a young woman. She wanted to see me succeed.

“Somehow she always manages to take your call, no matter what meeting she’s in and she becomes the fixer,” says Brajak Mady. “I have never heard her say, ‘I’m too busy’ — never once, and that includes when she’s travelling abroad.”

Her friends return her loyalty. For the most part.

She got a slap on the wrist from Integrity Commissioner Coulter Osborne in 2002 in a strange twist of fate case. Reading the full report sheds a more benign light on what opponents describe as an egregious transgression. Pupatello used a government courier service to ship boxes to London for a friend, believing she had official permission for her friend to pay a reduced rate. It became messy when Ms. Friend turned around and sued her in small claims court because she didn’t get the low rate she’d expected. The friend’s father paid the balance. Osborne called it “an error in judgment made in good faith in the particular circumstances.”

Nurturing is something Pupatello learned as a child from her own mother, Ada, who started work as a stenographer and retired from Immigration Canada as a councillor. “I never found out until after she retired how remarkable she’d been, how instrumental in helping” the careers of other women, says Pupatello, of her mother, now 82.

Core values of hard work and family first were paramount in the modest home of Ada and Mario Pizzolitto, both immigrants from Italy’s northern region of Fruili. A carpenter by trade who found work in the auto-parts industry, Mario would pile the family into his old Valiant — Sandra and brother Walter and their cousins in the back seat — and drive to Caboto Park for picnics and swimming. Sometimes he took them to nearby St. Joachim for fish and chips on a Friday night and the Pizzolitto kids always offered up their dad as neighbourhood chauffeur.

“He was a Liberal,” she says of her father, who passed away 10 years ago. “My dad said that when the Liberals are in government, the people are working.”

She developed a taste for travel early. During an exchange year in South Africa at 19, she lived with four families in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, where she attended university and witnessed the ugliness of apartheid. She came out of it believing that economic sanctions didn’t work. While there’s debate over the effectiveness of the trade embargo, championed by Canada’s then-prime minister, Brian Mulroney, African leaders such as Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela were strongly supportive.

She admires Mandela and heard him speak in Detroit, shortly after his release. Of the African National Congress’s Mandela, who would go on to become president in 1994, she says it’s remarkable that “he came out of 27 years in prison without a stitch of anger.”

There’s an idyllic quality to much of her life, particularly her childhood and, later, romance. Her first marriage to Franco Pupatello ended in divorce after 13 years. “It wasn’t for lack of trying,” she says. She was the first in her Roman Catholic family to divorce and she remembers: “I had to go and tell my grandfather. It was the worst moment of my life but I didn’t want him to hear it on Erie St.” in Windsor.

Ah, but then came Bennett. He was studying law in Windsor when they met and began dating. He returned to Newfoundland in 2002 with their future unsettled. “You don’t know if it’s going to go anywhere or not. You assume it won’t,” says Bennett, 59. “When you’re young you have that wonderful love forever, yada, yada, yada, but we didn’t know.”

Until they did. Over the summer of 2003, they married twice, in both civil and church ceremonies, and thought nothing of dividing their lives between Ontario and Newfoundland.

She’s also known heartache.

In October 2003, there was a stunning story in the Toronto Star that Pupatello was four months pregnant after seven miscarriages over 13 years. The story resonated because it seemed so painfully private. This was her fourth attempt using in vitro fertilization. While she was over the moon, she hadn’t wanted it publicized, but Star reporter Richard Brennan guessed. He’d known her forever and urged her to let people know about her “miracle.”

She later miscarried.

“It changes you,” she says. “It knocks anything other than modesty right out of your system. You have to go through tough things in order to understand other people’s pain. There are things you can’t control and you have to let go.”

She’s thrown herself into being a good Italian zia to her brother Walter’s three children, taking them to Queen’s Park and acting like a second mother.

“She’s the best,” says Walter Pizzolitto. “You know, if a girl from our neighbourhood can go on to be premier, what a great county.”

There’s the rub. Even if she wins this weekend, there’s this little matter of eventually going to the people in an election. Scandals have eroded Liberal support, with an unrelenting roll call that includes eHealth, ORNGE, scrapped gas plants and the fiasco with the province’s teachers. “It’s a scandal, completely outrageous,” said NDP MPP Peter Tabuns when the Liberals conceded the abandoned Mississauga plant cost $180 million. “The people of Ontario should be incredibly angry.”

A Dec. 22 poll by Forum Research put support for the Conservatives at 33 per cent of respondents, the NDP at 31 and the Liberals trailing with 27 per cent.

Pupatello seems to have all the confidence in the world in her abilities to persuade. “We are just getting started,” she says. “Other governments have had the opportunity to turn the page . . . Sure we have to shake it up. . . The leadership has to change, too.”

She points to Redford in Alberta, who she says faced similar obstacles: “not very popular, her party was down in the polls, the wheels were coming off and they said it would never happen.

“She did it. She’s so impressive.”

Her handicap is lacking a seat, but Dwight Duncan, friend and finance minister, has offered to step down immediately for a byelection in Windsor Tecumseh, and Pupatello insists Ontarians care about jobs, not a few more weeks with the legislature prorogued.

It’s a welcome image for the changemaker, to be seen as a go-getter ignored by stolid veterans. A savvy troubleshooter for her campaign says that’s exactly what happened, whether because of sexism, her style or her frankness.

Asked about it, Pupatello sent word that it wasn’t true and husband Bennett exclaimed, “No, no, not at all.”

He describes a recent call from McGuinty to “thank me for the sacrifice I was making for his province. Out of the blue. He knew how much her time commitment would have to be (as premier) and the level of sacrifice. He knew I urged her to run,” says Bennett. “Dalton’s a real down-to-earth guy and she sat beside him all those years. They’re closer than people realize.”

So there you have it. Clear?

It’s quite deliciously ambiguous. Delegates can take their pick on whether they want the bond with McGuinty in colour or black-and-white. Probably amidst the ambiguity of political backrooms, there’s truth to both versions.

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